CHINA'S REVOLUTION
Shaplen, Robert
China's Revolution CHINA SHAKES THE WORLD, by Jack Belden. Harper. 524 pp. $5. Reviewed by Robert Shaplen JACK BELDEN. author of Retreat With Stilwell, is one of those old-time reporters to whom...
...Like so many other devoted Sinophiles, Belden underestimates the world situation...
...author of Retreat With Stilwell, is one of those old-time reporters to whom the whirlwind tour and the slick armchair summation are anathema...
...Despite verbosity and occasional murkiness...
...These are obviously not the words of a fellow-traveler, in the narrow American sense, or even of an "agrarian reformist...
...His Manchurian chapter harshly underplays the help the Chinese Communists obtained from the Russians...
...He visualizes trouble ahead for the new rulers...
...he writes, and die-hard western supporters of Chiang might well ponder those words...
...Although the Communists came to power by doing something for the individual—"by making love to the people of China"—Belden explains that they are now trying "to unify China by the enthronement of the social right over the individual...
...And he sees danger in a Marxist philosophy evolving into the same sort of "intellectual mumbo-jumbo" that Confucianism became in enabling the Kuomintang to hold power...
...By describing what went on in the mountains and fields, he spells this out...
...The book's chief value, therefore, is in its factual play-byplay chronicle of what went on in the Communist areas from 1947 to 1949...
...But whether Mao Tze-tung eventually proves another Tito or not, the author fails to make clear that Mao's "inevitable" victory is just as inevitably a part of world Communist expansion...
...Thus they [the Communists] pave the way for absolutism, for obviously if the people can do no wrong, then the power that represents the people can also do no wrong...
...The need to industrialize the cities is liable to throw fresh burdens on the peasantry...
...The reader who wants to know in detail why the Communists won will find the answer here...
...Land reform broke open the peasant's soul and released a flood of mass passions...
...Manchuria, if not China, certainly looms as a new Soviet satellite...
...It is a tribute to this ex-Time-staffer that, despite its ardor and orientation, his book is so honest that the non-Communist left will generally approve...
...Whether they can make Chinese society cohere once more remains to be seen, he adds...
...let it be said at once that Belden the reporter-critic comes out on top of Belden the adventurer-story teller...
...China is so big that no single army can ever rule it alone, and this means tenuous alliances with some non-Marxists and opportunists...
...But the trend is just in the opposite direction...
...It is now the turn of the Communists to try to make a society in their own image...
...No matter what happens from here on, and Belden's skepticism is often keen, he will always regard the Communists' seizure of power as historically justified...
...Because the power rests on the people, it might be thought that the future of individual liberty is assured," he concludes...
...For us, the tragedy of the new Chinese revolution lies in Belden's own words of telescoped enthusiasm: "After all, the West has had 100 years to bring a better way of life to China...
...He should read with careful soul-searching if he is interested in finding a less ominous solution than Communism for the rest of Asia...
...Communism brought few other economic benefits, but re-distribution of the land, from which rent and taxation reforms sprang, made the peasant class-quriuscious for the first time, created a new moral force, broke up the traditional family system of narrow paternalism, and increased production by stimulating cooperative (not collective) labor among farmers...
...Chiang Kai-shek had 20 years...
...To get a good story, Belden knows, takes times and patience, and he is at his best swapping tales and spitting melon seeds with the peasants or creeping through the mountains with a murderous guerrilla unit...
...II Belden's basic theme is that land-reform was the real dynamic of the Communist revolution, not so much an economic panacea as a technique of successful rebellion...
...It might also be pointed out here that Russia still holds Dairen, the valuable Manchurian port where the Communists are their puppets, and that an important trade pact was signed recently between Moscow and semi-independent Manchurian Red "representatives...
...Although his new book reveals him once more as a lover of action, a romanticist, and a believer in rev-olution per se, it is outsanding for the fairness and skepticism with which he analyzes the last three vital years in China...
...For any power which bases itself on the general will must, by definition, end up by subjecting the general will...
...The party by no means controls all of those who joined it out of desperation...
...But there is one basic criticism to make...
...In a mature discussion of power and liberty, Belden points out that the intellectuals will rule Red China, not the peasants...
...He sees as "remote"—a one in 100 chance (!)—the interference of Soviet Russia...
...From the outset Belden makes clear that Chiang Kai-shek's Kuo-mintang was finally defeated because it lost the support of the people between 1945 and 1949...
...Belden's sympathy with the Communists derives not so much from agreement with their beliefs and strictures as from his own deep inner approval of their accomplishments as revolutionists—from the simple fact of their overdue and violent victory over an outmoded, decadent, and rotten regime...
...Belden is undoubtedly right in concluding that the Communists will win or lose in the long run in China proper by what they themselves do for the people...
Vol. 14 • January 1950 • No. 1
